'Craziest Canucks' paved way for skeleton racing

OTTAWA - As the greatest athletes on earth go for Olympic gold, two slightly deranged Canadians will always be tough to beat for the title of wackiest national team ever to compete for a world championship.

It isn't just a matter that their sport of skeleton racing is sheer lunacy - plunging headfirst down a bobsled run at 100 km/hr., lying almost nose-to-ice on a contraption that looks like a kid's sleigh with no steering or brakes.

When Bill Brown and Peter Fallis arrived in Switzerland for the first ever skeleton world championships in 1982, they were facing a challenge even more daunting than sheer terror on sheer ice.

It was also their first race. Ever.

In fact, until nine weeks before the championship, they had never even been on a skeleton run.

By the time it was all over, the European media would affectionately dub them the Craziest Canucks.

Everyone else thought they were just plain nuts.

The races that year in St. Moritz would begin laying the foundation for skeleton to become a full Olympic sport two decades later, and today Canada has some of the finest competitors in the sport.

Great athletes the Craziest Canucks definitely were not.

Then in their late thirties, Brown and Fallis were comfortable Ottawa-area businessmen in physical condition to match.

Fittingly, their story begins in a bar in Lake Placid, N.Y., home to a notoriously bone-crushing bobsled track.

The duo had never seen a skeleton sled before that day, but the U.S. team had been practising, and somehow the Canucks talked their way into a beer-assisted run.

"It was terrifying to say the least," Fallis recalls.

Back in the bar, a member of the U.S. national team said: "You must be the Canadian skeleton team."

Brown and Fallis looked at each other, cracked up at the mere thought, but decided to play along for a joke.

"That's great," the American racer said with some excitement. "There is a world championship coming up, and it will be officially sanctioned if we have eight teams, and you're the eighth."

Back home in Ottawa with no equipment, no training, no idea what they were doing, and only nine weeks to prepare for a world championship, the two reached a madman's decision: Why not?

Fallis recalls they went to the feds for sports funding: "They gave us a pocketful of Maple Leaf pins and wished us good luck."

Nine weeks after discovering the horrors of skeleton racing, Canada's most unlikely national team arrived in St. Moritz to compete against the best.

The other teams spent their time studying the icy, twisting track.

Brown says all he remembers is "worrying about whether you are going to get down without killing yourself."

Skilled racers made it down without touching the ice walls, not only for speed but self-preservation.

Brown and Fallis looked like a couple of bowling balls clattering down the gutter, bashing and bruising themselves with each painful high-speed brush with the blue ice.